Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The play of ‘Daisies’
Daisies (1966) is a Czech movie directed by Vĕra Chytilová. I first saw it on BBC2, I think probably some time in the mid-1980s.
I had never seen a movie like it before and haven’t since. It’s an extraordinary piece of film making and I watch it every couple of years.
It’s a difficult movie to describe. It consists of a sequence of scenes which centre on two young women. The scenes which they occupy are naturalistic – an outdoor swimming pool, a restaurant, the women’s toilet at the restaurant, their apartment, a railway station, a town street at dawn, a river, a large building which contains a symphony orchestra and a table set for a banquet. But the women themselves are represented in a largely non-naturalistic fashion. They are forever putting on large quantities of eye-shadow, which give them a doll-like appearance. Their behaviour is infantile. They disturb and destroy things, and for much of the movie they are seen eating or drinking. All through the movie they keep snickering in a shrill, childish way. Their behaviour is also overtly non-naturalistic. At times they break into dance routines. Sometimes they walk stiffly, like robots. At times they dress up in outlandish ways. Their dialogue is deadpan and disconnected. In so far as the movie has an organising principle it is repetition: it keeps returning to the same settings. But the return does not enlighten.
If there is a central impulse here it’s play. The women are, as one of them says, “spoiled girls”. They produce nothing. All they do is consume and destroy. There is a quiet joy in this consumption and destruction. And their destruction is of the minor, harmless sort. At the start and end of Daisies we get authentic war footage. Perhaps the point is that the behaviour of grownups is much worse than that of spoiled infants. Yet the film resists that kind of easy deduction. Its form expresses its content. The medium is the message. Daisies annihilates the normal conventions of film grammar. It has no sequential or coherent narrative. Some scenes are grey, most are brightly lit and lush with colour. The grain of the image switches abruptly: the colouration changes without explanation. At times the image is speeded up. When the women begin to cut things up with scissors, the image itself is shredded. Most of all Daisies is a film which exploits to the full the possibilities of soundtrack. Often the soundtrack works against the grain of the image. It’s an unnerving effect when set against the naturalistic conventions of almost all cinema.
The play of Daisies is one of comedy and joy. It is not a movie for miserabilists. What Tristram Shandy did for the genre of the novel, Daisies does for cinema. Like Tristram Shandy it rides on a wave of exuberance; it is not for those who require a narrative that unfolds a story, where elegantly manufactured characters move towards a terminus that is simultaneously enlightening and heartwarming/uplifting/sad/satisfying/wise. Everyone and everything is being laughed at in Daisies, including any viewer who seeks to domesticate it with explanation. At times the narrative becomes pure collage – a blur of images impossible to pin down or retrieve or make sense of. Bourgeois couples are mocked. Lecherous old men are mocked. Romantic young men are mocked. The workers are mocked. Decency and good manners are mocked. The machinery of order is mocked.
Daisies is a movie which refuses to participate in society.
I’ve been babbling about Daisies for years but I’ve never met anyone who’s seen it or heard of it. I even once lent my precious copy to _____ who was doing a film studies degree but _____ watched it and returned it with icy disdain. Not a good film, in _____’s view.
But now I know I am not alone in the wastes of outer space. I was galvanized into watching it again by a mention of the movie in the ‘Lenosphere’, supplying links to two very impressive appreciations of Daisies, each one well worth checking out:
The film has always been treated somewhat sniffily- either by the apparachtiks who banned it, or from western critics, for whom the film failed to fit into the sombre mode of the East European film- no struggles against a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, no method-acting male heroes, no interminable Kunderian love affairs-and an irritatingly ambiguous political import, as the film could be interpreted easily enough as Stalinist, consumerist, sexist, feminist or Anarchist, depending on one’s prejudice (the Time Out Film Guide is especially savage).
Says The Measures Taken
Daisies obliterates both individual and collective in its fervidly antisocial jouissance. (The two Maries cannot exist without one another; their duality is as irreducible to any sort of heroic or existential solitude and individuality, as it is to any sort of social bond or collectivity). And this antipolitical virulence is precisely the film’s (crucial) political import: one that perhaps we need today, in our “connected” world of inescapable networks and ubiquitous commodification, as much as it was needed 40-odd years ago in the world of “actually existing socialism.”
Says The Pinocchio Theory.
I had never seen a movie like it before and haven’t since. It’s an extraordinary piece of film making and I watch it every couple of years.
It’s a difficult movie to describe. It consists of a sequence of scenes which centre on two young women. The scenes which they occupy are naturalistic – an outdoor swimming pool, a restaurant, the women’s toilet at the restaurant, their apartment, a railway station, a town street at dawn, a river, a large building which contains a symphony orchestra and a table set for a banquet. But the women themselves are represented in a largely non-naturalistic fashion. They are forever putting on large quantities of eye-shadow, which give them a doll-like appearance. Their behaviour is infantile. They disturb and destroy things, and for much of the movie they are seen eating or drinking. All through the movie they keep snickering in a shrill, childish way. Their behaviour is also overtly non-naturalistic. At times they break into dance routines. Sometimes they walk stiffly, like robots. At times they dress up in outlandish ways. Their dialogue is deadpan and disconnected. In so far as the movie has an organising principle it is repetition: it keeps returning to the same settings. But the return does not enlighten.
If there is a central impulse here it’s play. The women are, as one of them says, “spoiled girls”. They produce nothing. All they do is consume and destroy. There is a quiet joy in this consumption and destruction. And their destruction is of the minor, harmless sort. At the start and end of Daisies we get authentic war footage. Perhaps the point is that the behaviour of grownups is much worse than that of spoiled infants. Yet the film resists that kind of easy deduction. Its form expresses its content. The medium is the message. Daisies annihilates the normal conventions of film grammar. It has no sequential or coherent narrative. Some scenes are grey, most are brightly lit and lush with colour. The grain of the image switches abruptly: the colouration changes without explanation. At times the image is speeded up. When the women begin to cut things up with scissors, the image itself is shredded. Most of all Daisies is a film which exploits to the full the possibilities of soundtrack. Often the soundtrack works against the grain of the image. It’s an unnerving effect when set against the naturalistic conventions of almost all cinema.
The play of Daisies is one of comedy and joy. It is not a movie for miserabilists. What Tristram Shandy did for the genre of the novel, Daisies does for cinema. Like Tristram Shandy it rides on a wave of exuberance; it is not for those who require a narrative that unfolds a story, where elegantly manufactured characters move towards a terminus that is simultaneously enlightening and heartwarming/uplifting/sad/satisfying/wise. Everyone and everything is being laughed at in Daisies, including any viewer who seeks to domesticate it with explanation. At times the narrative becomes pure collage – a blur of images impossible to pin down or retrieve or make sense of. Bourgeois couples are mocked. Lecherous old men are mocked. Romantic young men are mocked. The workers are mocked. Decency and good manners are mocked. The machinery of order is mocked.
Daisies is a movie which refuses to participate in society.
I’ve been babbling about Daisies for years but I’ve never met anyone who’s seen it or heard of it. I even once lent my precious copy to _____ who was doing a film studies degree but _____ watched it and returned it with icy disdain. Not a good film, in _____’s view.
But now I know I am not alone in the wastes of outer space. I was galvanized into watching it again by a mention of the movie in the ‘Lenosphere’, supplying links to two very impressive appreciations of Daisies, each one well worth checking out:
The film has always been treated somewhat sniffily- either by the apparachtiks who banned it, or from western critics, for whom the film failed to fit into the sombre mode of the East European film- no struggles against a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, no method-acting male heroes, no interminable Kunderian love affairs-and an irritatingly ambiguous political import, as the film could be interpreted easily enough as Stalinist, consumerist, sexist, feminist or Anarchist, depending on one’s prejudice (the Time Out Film Guide is especially savage).
Says The Measures Taken
Daisies obliterates both individual and collective in its fervidly antisocial jouissance. (The two Maries cannot exist without one another; their duality is as irreducible to any sort of heroic or existential solitude and individuality, as it is to any sort of social bond or collectivity). And this antipolitical virulence is precisely the film’s (crucial) political import: one that perhaps we need today, in our “connected” world of inescapable networks and ubiquitous commodification, as much as it was needed 40-odd years ago in the world of “actually existing socialism.”
Says The Pinocchio Theory.
# posted by Ellis : 8:00 PM
